WASBO to form women commission
The Women and Sport Botswana (WASBO) has laboured towards formulating a Women Commission. Through the assistance of the Botswana National Sport Commission (BNSC) WASBO has managed to lure 11 national associations to the women’s commission. In an interview this week WASBO Marketing and Publicity Officer, Thulaganyo Retshabile said the mandate of the women commission is to fashion a working relationship with the national associations to support WASBO mandates at their level. “The effort is to ensure that National sport associations have strategies, plans and policies to protect the girl child and retention of the girl child, the commission was expected to be fully fledged by March this year but was disrupted by the Covid- 19 pandemic,” she said.
She added that the commission is set to benefit women in sport at most as it will be WASBO’s eye at National association level to ensure that all WASBO mandates and objectives are met at lower levels and structures.
According to Retshabile, the National sport associations will decide on the composition of the commission, whereby the chairperson of the commission will be expected and entitled to attend WASBO general assembly and other related conventions. WASBO recently held its Sports Pitso where all these were outlined. Among other things, resolutions were made during the Pitso and it was recommended that sport be used as a tool to promote gender Equality in sport as part of the national gender strategy. Consequently, it was agreed gender equality discussions should be introduced to seven year olds as they are already conscious of gender differences. Support is to be given to women and initiatives that encourage women to come up with Sport for Development organizations.
The Women in Sports Pitso 2020 virtual meeting held in Gaborone last week was a window of opportunity to address many other issues faced by women in sport. BNSC Vice Chairperson Tebogo Lebotse Sebego noted that women sports have been shut out in the cold after government allegedly ignored women after male dominated sporting codes were provided with relief funds for COVID -19.Lebotse Sebego revealed that the Gender Sport Strategy (GSS) formulated by WASBO required a staggering P6 million to implement.